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The Native South and Eleventh-Hour History: Reconceptualizing Early America

2024; Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; Volume: 81; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wmq.2024.a918183

1933-7698

Malinda Maynor Lowery, Christina Snyder,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

The Native South and Eleventh-Hour History:Reconceptualizing Early America Malinda Maynor Lowery (bio) and Christina Snyder (bio) WHILE this Forum assesses "the end of early America," we argue that scholars must begin their reassessment with the beginning. In a nineteenth-century speech to a white audience, Choctaw scholar Adam Christie explained that Native people had built and ruled civilizations for millenia before the European invasion, declaring, "The Indians once stood like lords over this continent."1 Historians should take a cue from Christie and other Native scholars. If we think of history as a quest to understand the human past—not just the study of written documents generated largely by elite Euro-Americans—then we must radically revise our scale of time, our methods, and our scope of historical actors when considering the key themes and periods of American history. In Native terms, what most scholars deem "early American history" began only recently. Conservative estimates place the emergence of Native communities in North America at around 15,000 B.C.E. If we think of this human history as a twenty-four-hour day that begins at 12:01 a.m., Europeans arrived at about 11:15 p.m. Most of "early American" scholarship, then, is more properly "eleventh-hour history."2 [End Page 103] Such a vast timescale, and a radical reorientation of our study of it, becomes easier to grasp when we take questions of place as seriously as we take questions of time. In this article, we contend that place is central to how people understand history, and, because we study the Native South, we ground this essay in that region. As our title suggests, we are interested in how Native-centered history should prompt all scholars to begin to see the world from a different perspective and therefore rethink our periodization of the past and our use of key terms, including "early America" and "colonial America," as well as regional designations, such as "southern." What does the history of this time and place look like if we see it through a Native lens? Who are its key actors? How does Native history prompt us to revisit the periodization of American history? Much of what we know about the South's prerevolutionary past comes from well-connected white men such as Edmond Atkin, a South Carolina trader who wrote the first lengthy study of Native southern nations in the mid-eighteenth century and popularized the term "Southern Nations" in British imperial policymaking. In a report to the British Board of Trade, Atkin offered a new plan to extend British influence in the North American interior, and he foregrounded trade and diplomacy with Native nations. Contrasting southern Native nations with northern nations, Atkin proposed that the British Empire split Indian administration into two districts. He described key southern Indian nations, including the Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and Muscogee Creeks, and their dominion: from the Great Cherokee River (now called the Tennessee River) south to the Gulf Coast, and from the Atlantic coast west to the Mississippi Valley. Atkin recognized, however, that geography alone did not define the term "Southern." Rather, drawing on twenty years of experience in trade and diplomacy, he identified three characteristics that distinguished southern Indian nations from their northern counterparts: they lived outside the Haudenosaunee sphere of influence; they were "by far the most numerous" Native nations; and they harbored no British forts in their territories and, as a result, controlled the southern interior.3 These categories were of cultural, military, and demographic significance. In this 1755 report (historians refer to it as the "Plan of 1755"), Atkin explained how the British Empire could counter French influence and draw southern Indian nations into Britain's political and economic dominion. In [End Page 104] doing so, he prompted a new way of thinking about early America and the Atlantic world—new, at least, to the British. Atkin's framework persuaded the Board of Trade, who rewarded Atkin by installing him as the first Southern Indian Superintendent. Atkin did not acknowledge that his plan was inspired by Native people's own definitions of themselves. Years before Atkin published his report, a delegation of Muscogee Creek Indians...